National-cultural specificity of adverbial phraseological units in English and Russian.

Abstract

This article is dedication to examination of national and cultural specificity of adverbial phraseological units in the English and Russian languages. The subject of this research is the peculiarities of three levels of manifestation of national and cultural specificity of phraseological units: 1) in combined phraseological sense; 2) in the sense of separate lexical elements; 3) in the direct sense of a free phrase that was interpreted figuratively (i.e. in the prototypes of phraseological units). Characteristic is given to each level of manifestation, based on the analysis of the composition of phraseologism. The author compares a number of phraseological units of the Russian and English languages, selected from the Russian Phraseological Dictionary, Russian and British National Corpora. The scientific novelty consists in description of manifestation of the national and cultural specificity of a number of unique phraseological units of the English and Russian language, which based on conducted study of component composition, do not have analogues. The following conclusions were made: the first level of manifestation of national and cultural specificity of phraseological units is associated with nonequivalent or lacunar adverbial units; the phraseological units of second group, the number of which is very limited, feature a national and cultural component in their composition, which can be interpreted with the words that designate the realias characteristic for the English or Russian bilinguals; the phraseological units of third group reflect history of the native English and Russian languages, their distinct traditions, customs, historical facts, and superstitions initially founded in the prototype.